George Walker Bush declared victory in the race for president Wednesday, driving a national election that bolstered Republican strength in Congress and led the White House to proclaim that Bush had won a “mandate” from the American public for a second term.

Bush beamed as he stood with Vice President Dick Cheney at a rally in Washington, D.C., four hours after accepting a concession call at the White House from Sen. John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who waged a fierce challenge to unseat him.

“We had a long night – and a great night,” Bush said. “The voters turned out in record numbers and delivered an historic victory.

“America has spoken, and I’m humbled by the trust and the confidence of my fellow citizens,” he said. “With that trust comes a duty to serve all Americans, and I will do my best to fulfill that duty every day as your president.”

In calling the president, Kerry abandoned a threat to contest the election result in Ohio in deference to a decisive popular vote victory by a man who four years ago won the presidency with less than 50 percent of the popular vote.

“We cannot win this election,” Kerry said somberly to supporters at Faneuil Hall in Boston.

The victory by Bush amounted to a striking turn in fortunes for the nation’s 43rd president, who had at times this year seemed destined to repeat his father’s fate of losing a second term because of a weak economy. Instead, Bush won more popular votes than any president in history – 58.6 million, or 3.5 million more than Kerry, albeit in a nation with an expanding population of voters – and positioned himself and his party to push through a conservative agenda in Washington over the next four years.

Bush became the first Republican president since Calvin Coolidge to win re-election while gaining seats in the House and Senate. The Republicans picked up at least two in the House and four in the Senate. While Republicans did not win enough seats to provide Bush a veto-proof Congress, the party’s surge did result in the defeat of Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Senate minority leader and one of the most familiar Democratic faces in Washington.

Bush spoke only in broad terms of what he might do in a second term. But he strongly signaled that he was looking to stabilize the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq to allow the return of American soldiers.

“We will help the emerging democracies of Iraq and Afghanistan, so they can grow in strength and defend their freedom, and then our servicemen and women will come home with the honor they have earned,” he said.

Cheney, in introducing the president at the rally at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center less than a half-mile from the White House, left little doubt about how this White House saw the election, and what it intended to do with it. He said the president had run “forthrightly on a clear agenda for this nation’s future, and the nation responded by giving him a mandate.”

Bush’s victory was powered in no small part by a huge turn-out among Evangelical Christians, who are now likely to seek a bigger voice in key White House decisions over the next four years – in particular, nominations of Supreme Court justices that are likely to consume parts of Bush’s second term.

Bush, as he did when he won four years ago, made a point in his victory speech of reaching out to Democrats, saying he wanted to unify a country that had been divided not only by the contest with Kerry but by the circumstances of Bush’s victory four years ago.

“I want to speak to every person who voted for my opponent,” he said. “To make this nation stronger and better, I will need your support and I will work to earn it. I will do all I can do to deserve your trust. A new term is a new opportunity to reach out to the whole nation. We have one country, one Constitution and one future that binds us.”

Kerry struck a similar tone in his concession speech in Boston, though it reprised, if indirectly, some of the criticisms he had made of Bush during the campaign.

“America is in need of unity and longing for a larger measure of compassion,” Kerry said. “I hope President Bush will advance those values in the coming years. I pledge to do my part to try to bridge the partisan divide.

“I know this is a difficult time for my supporters, but I ask you – all of you – to join me in doing this,” said Kerry, whose voice cracked at times in an uncharacteristic display of public emotion

Aides to both parties said they were doubtful that the capital was headed for a period of political calm.

“I don’t think a 51-49 election is any mandate,” Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic National Committee chairman, said in an interview. “George Bush won, and I congratulate him on that. They ran a very effective campaign and he won. They need to be very careful that they now need to govern from the middle in a bipartisan way. This country as we saw in the election is very evenly split.”

For much of Tuesday and into Wednesday, it seemed as if the election of 2004 was turning into a reprise of the election of 2000, with a series of tight races and some confusion in counting combining to create a night of tumult and uncertainty. At 2:30 Wednesday morning, Kerry’s running-mate, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, went to the stage in Boston where Kerry had hoped to declare victory to say that the Kerry campaign was contesting the result in Ohio, and would not concede until all the outstanding votes there were counted.

Bush nearly appeared at 4 a.m. Wednesday to declare victory in the face of the Kerry campaign threat. But the situation in Ohio was no where near as disputed as it was in Florida four years ago, and Bush’s advisers decided to instead hold off in the hopes that Kerry would, upon awakening, decide the cause was hopeless and concede, which is what happened.

The 2004 election turned out to be different in another way as well: For all the fears of Democrats this year, Ralph Nader, the independent candidate, drew so few votes that he had no impact on the outcome in any state.

If Republicans were ecstatic at having won a clean victory without the baggage of 2000, Democrats were bereft at what several described as a rout on Tuesday, and there were immediate signs that the party was facing a dark period of intramural battles.

Several Democrats questioned Kerry’s decision to concede without pressing for a full count of the votes in Ohio, warning that it would discourage first-time voters – particularly minorities in future elections. “I understand the need to put it behind him, given the math,” said Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore’s 2000 campaign for president. “But he has an obligation to allow all these votes to be counted.”

Tellingly, associates to Edwards made a point of informing reporters that Edwards had urged Kerry not to give up in Ohio so soon, in what some Democrats described as probably the opening shot of – yes – the 2008 presidential campaign. Edwards is likely to now seek his party’s nomination that year, and thus is eager not to do anything in the final days of this campaign that could come back to haunt him in 2008.

“He conveyed his point of view and Kerry made his own a decision,” one Edwards advisor said, adding that the senator “was disappointed but made peace with the result.”

Democrats resigned themselves to having even less influence in the Senate and the House. In the Senate, Harry Reid of Nevada was moving to take over the minority leadership post being vacated by Daschle. With the four-seat gain, Republicans will have 55 senators, still short of a 60-vote filibuster-proof margin. But Republicans said they hoped that Democrats would see Daschle’s defeat as a cautionary lesson that would prevent them from trying to use legislative techniques to entangle Republican initiatives.

McAuliffe and other Democrats tried to put the best face on the defeat, saying that Kerry was facing a difficult task in trying to unseat a sitting president during wartime. He argued that Bush was helped by the emergence last weekend of a videotape featuring Osama bin Laden addressing Americans, which reminded voters of the issue – fear of terrorism – that had always been central to Bush’s campaign.

“You’ve got to remember that he went in with a tough deck of cards,” McAuliffe said of Kerry.

Still, Democrats seemed as startled as Republicans were delighted by the unlikelihood of the victory. Bush prevailed despite the legacy of one of the most disputed elections in the nation’s history. He overcame polls showing that voters disapproved of his job performance and the direction in which the country was heading, two measures that typically augur defeat for an incumbent.

Bush not only won Florida, but he won it by a comfortable margin. He also won the other of the two most contested states, Ohio. He also won both states in 2000. Kerry grabbed New Hampshire from the Republican column, while Bush yanked New Mexico away from the Democrats.

Bush was ahead in another state Gore barely won last time – Iowa – though officials there were recounting the vote.

Kerry, in his appearance in Boston, sought to erase any doubt about the vote in Ohio, and made clear that he did not want a protracted repeat of the 2000 battle that tore the country. “In America, it is vital that very vote count and every vote be counted,” he said. “But the outcome should be decided by voters – not a protracted legal process.”

As his audience listened in near-silence, Kerry, who had built a campaign around the Bruce Springsteen song “No Surrender” and promised to fight Republicans in a way Democrats never had before, said he had no reservations about abandoning this one, and returning to his post in the U.S. Senate.

“I would not give up this fight if there was a chance that we would prevail,” he said.

SAN JOSE -- Grenades were discovered at an estate sale Monday, prompting the evacuation of about 10 homes near the San Jose Country Club, according to the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office. Deputies were called to the 300 block of Gordon Avenue, near Greenside Drive, about 4:10 p.m., said Sgt. Rich Glennon. Get breaking news with our free mobile app....

The seven adult children of David and Louise Turpin, the couple accused of abusing and imprisoning them for years at their Perris home, have been released from the hospital, their attorney said Monday.